The use of electricity to build or strengthen muscle has a long history of questionable claims. These claims are unsubstantiated for the most part. Neither NASA nor any professional athlete or body builder uses the technique, relying instead on traditional resistance exercises.
Rehabilitationists, chiropractors, and doctors of physical medicine still subject patients to the rigors of electrotherapy. They claim that it has some effect on the alteration of muscle structure yet are unable to given any specifics about such changes in structure. Endorsements of electrotherapy in building muscle are based upon changes in performance of the patient. These changes are so inconsiderable that electrotherapy has yet to escape a clinical setting or demonstrate more effectiveness than the placebo effect.
The clinical inconsequence of electrotherapy is due to the following three things:
(1) The traditional reliance upon the electrotherapeutic use of alternating or faradic current. Such current is incapable of inducing chemical changes of any sort, and is used mainly for either voltage transmission or the transduction of mechanical energy. If electricity is thought of as a fluid, then alternating current passes on fluid pressure while direct current passes on that pressure and the fluid itself.
(2) The desire to avoid ionization of the skin, when direct or galvanic current is used, prevents the electrotherapist from appreciating the electronic nature of electricity and the role of electrons in all chemical binding, especially that of organic chemistry. Direct current or chemical energy is electrons, as cathode rays or beta radiation, that results in ionization of the skin, something that does not result from the use of alternating or faradic current.
(3) Finally, electrotherapists triggering muscle contractions using electricity are not aware that to build muscle in this manner the impulse must be analogous to that which the body uses. The body does not use alternating current. It uses direct current (DC) in the form of electrochemistry. In addition, the impulse is delivered by the nerve to the site of the neuromuscular junction or motor endplate region, and not to the surface of muscle groups in a haphazard manner.
During WWII four researchers for the Veterans Administration of the time [Guttman, Melville, Wehrmacher, Hines] found that those receiving what was called ‘galvanic exercise’ for hands atrophic from disuse following an ulnar nerve lesion later repaired by surgery, recovered muscle bulk and strength of use far faster than those restricted to physical therapy only. The results of the clinical testing were noted and never expanded upon. Electrotherapists retained the use of faradic or alternating current (AC) because AC did not require the expensive switching equipment to turn the current on and off repeatedly for each new muscle twitch. Nor does AC cause skin problems if allowed to run on for more than 10 seconds. A paper on the treatment of bioelectricity appeared the following decade and spoke of bioelectricity in terms of the movement of ions, as if electricity were atomic or molecular rather than electronic. This account, awarded Nobel prizes in 1963 and 1978, is the standard explanation for nervous system and cellular functioning even today. This account does not distinguish between AC and DC, nor does it treat bioelectricity as involving electron movement at all. It is incapable of exploiting the health benefits of electrochemistry or of discerning why electrotherapy using alternating current has no consequence. Consequently the electrotherapy still practiced resorts exclusively to the use of alternating or faradic current.
There is a need for a more effective system for exploiting the health benefits of electrochemistry through the use of DC.